Most of the people who buy a turbine from us are not experts in what salt air does to metal. A boatyard is. A yard on the Breton coast spends its whole working year fighting corrosion, and the people in it have opinions about coatings, fasteners and bearings that they did not get from a brochure. That makes a boatyard the hardest place we can put a machine, and the most useful.
Where Trégunc is, and why it matters
Chantier naval Marée Haute sits at Trégunc, in the Finistère, on the south coast of Brittany between Concarneau and Pont-Aven. The yard is on the Minaouët, a short tidal river running down to a coast that faces open water to the south and west. The department is called Finistère for a reason: finis terrae, the end of the earth. It is the westernmost part of mainland France, and the weather arriving there has crossed the Atlantic without meeting anything first.
Trégunc on the south Finistère coast. Drawn by us from public coordinate data.
We have spent a lot of these posts telling people that their site is probably worse than they think. We told buyers in Palermo that a roof in the middle of the old city is in the wind shadow of everything around it. We told buyers in Saudi Arabia that most of the interior is not windy and that they should measure before they spend anything. This is the post where we get to say the opposite, and it feels strange enough that we want to be careful about it.
The work and the wind arrive in the same month
Here is the part that is specific to a boatyard rather than to Brittany in general. A yard's year is not flat. Boats come out of the water in autumn and go back in around spring, and the months in between are when the heavy work happens: hivernage, carénage, antifouling, aérogommage, sanding, painting, engine work, refits. That is compressors running, extraction running, lighting running, in a shed, in the dark half of the year.
And the dark half of the year on the Atlantic coast of Brittany is the windy half. The depressions that come through in winter are the strongest weather the region gets, and they arrive in exactly the months when a solar panel is producing least and a yard is drawing most. That is not a coincidence we engineered. It is just what a maritime climate does, and it happens to line up with how a boatyard works.
A boatyard year, drawn as three shapes. Deliberately schematic and not to scale — it is the phase relationship that matters, not the values.
Everywhere else we argue that a panel and a turbine fail on different days. At a boatyard they also succeed in the right months.
A hull and a blade are the same problem
Marée Haute has been at Trégunc for more than twenty years, and one of its main activities is building Django sailing yachts from end to end — the 7.70+, the 9.80 and the 12.70 — alongside the service side of the business: mechanics and repowering, keel and rudder work, composite and timber repair, rigging, electronics, winter storage. In other words they laminate their own hulls.
That is worth pausing on, because a hull and a turbine blade are the same kind of object. Both are a shape whose only job is to move through a fluid without wasting energy in turbulence, and in both cases a small error in the profile is invisible in a photograph and permanent in the finished part. We cut our own blades on our own laser for exactly the reason a yard laminates its own hulls: because the shape is the product, and you do not subcontract the product.
A Django 9.80 under sail, filmed by Marée Haute. Watch it on YouTube if the player does not load. Video © Marée Haute, embedded from their own channel.
We would rather sell to people who can catch us out
A yard does not need us to explain corrosion to it. Antifouling, aérogommage, paint on the œuvres vives, sail-drive seals, sacrificial anodes — managing what salt water and salt air do to hardware is not a footnote in that business, it is the business. Which means that if the finish on one of our machines is not up to it, the people at Trégunc will know before we do, and they will say so.
That is uncomfortable and it is the point. It is easy to sell hardware to somebody who will not notice for three years. It is a good deal harder, and much more useful, to sell it to a workshop that will have an opinion by the end of the first winter.
The yard at Trégunc, filmed by Marée Haute. Watch it on YouTube if the player does not load. Video © Marée Haute, embedded from their own channel.
What we would hold against us, in your position
Salt first, because it is the obvious one and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Coastal air corrodes hardware left outdoors, ours included. Everything we sell is designed to live outside, but designed to live outside and indifferent to twenty years of Atlantic salt are not the same claim, and only the first one is ours to make. On that coast a machine of ours will need looking at, the way everything else in a yard needs looking at.
Second, a yard is not automatically a good site just because it is near the sea. Yards have big sheds, and a big shed is a big wind shadow. Boats on the hard with their masts up are not nothing either. A turbine tucked down between two buildings on a coastal site can do worse than one on an ordinary exposed roof twenty kilometres inland. The coast helps; the layout decides.
Third, a yard's demand is not a household's. Compressors and extraction are a different load from a fridge and some lights, and one small turbine is a contribution to that, not an answer to it. We would rather write that down plainly than let anyone infer we are proposing to run a boatyard on a single machine. Measure the site, look at what the yard actually draws in February, and size it from there.
The map and the seasonal diagram on this page are ours; the map is drawn from public coordinate data and the diagram is schematic rather than measured. The photograph of the Finistère coast is a licensed stock image, not our own, unlike the factory photographs elsewhere on this blog, which are. The two films are Marée Haute's own work, embedded from their public YouTube channel and not re-hosted by us. What the yard does and how long it has been doing it are taken from its own published description of itself. The turbine figures are our own published specifications and are checkable on the product page.